Leaving aside for the moment
the petty let's be children and see if we can grind the government to a
halt game going on amongst parties and sub-parties, and the fact that
both parties blessed every single debt cap increase placed before them
in equal measure over the past decade of Bush *2 + Obama * 1/2, I just want to focus on House Budget
Chairman, Paul Ryan's, corporate tax decrease proposal for a second -
because the math is so bizarre.

Looking at 2010 - the Federal government took in about $2.1 trillion worth of tax revenues, 8.9% of those
came from corporate taxes, or about $187 billion. That left individuals
footing 41.5% of the bill through individual income tax and another 40%
through social security and retirement taxes (get it - we do pay into
the system, $840 billion dollars in 2010 to be exact), with the
remainder of tax receipts coming from excise and 'other' sources. (The
percentage of federal tax revenues that corporations paid in 2009 was
6.6% - the lowest on record.)

The notion that slicing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% would spur large corporations to either:

a) fire their accounting staffs and do their returns on Turbo Tax

b) willfully bring all their relevant earnings onshore

c) engage in major hiring sprees or

d) pay rank-and-file workers proportionately more and CEOs proportionately less than in the past

is obviously ludicrous, though not to
Ryan or the GOP or apparently, the portion of the Dems that aren't
spitting at them with their calculators.

Besides that, it's not supported by
fact. To the contrary, since the 1930s, each year in which corporations
paid less than 10% of the overall federal tax receipts, coincided with
recession and unemployment spikes. The last time that the overall
percentage of corporate tax receipts was greater than that of individual
ones was in 1943. In other words, when things are shaky for the overall
economy, corporations bear a proportionately lower share of tax
revenues than individuals. This is not exclusively, but certainly
probably, due to their ability to move stuff around their books and hire
scores of CPA's to help.

During the 1920s, Treasury Secretary,
Andrew Mellon substantially hacked tax rates for companies and the
general public under the premise that a magical 20% tax rate would
discourage the rich and the corporate from seeking off-shore tax havens
and on-shore loopholes. Though Mellon did manage to balance the budget
after World War I, the tax practice led to an over-bloated and
over-leveraged financial economy during the 1920s followed by the Great
Depression. It didn't make charities out of companies. Even though it
was more progressive than what we have today.

Sure, the budget stands a bloated mess.
But the revenue side and mechanism is far more broken than the spending
side, which itself grew due to the cost of wars, weapons and financial
subsidies to the nation's richest people and corporations (especially
the Wall Street ones). Lowering the corporate tax rate would merely
reduce the share of corporate taxes getting to the federal till even
further.

Companies like GE may operate under a
35% tax rate in theory, but in practice that rate could be 50% or 0% and
the result would be the same, not only because of the complexity of the
loopholes in the corporate tax code, but also because there is no
wherewithal in the government, or the Treasury department to do anything
about it. Hell, the Treasury Department assisted GE Capital, GE's
financial, er - hedge fund - arm, when it needed a 'crisis' bailout. The
FDIC stepped in with a $140 billion guarantee for their debt in 2008
and 2009. Not only didn't GE pay any taxes during those years, but for
2010, the company managed to manufacture its largest tax refund - $4.1
billion.

How is lowering the corporate tax rate
going to change that exactly? Uh, it's not. What it would do, is create a
wider budget gap and send more politicians scratching their heads over
why. So, it's really just a super-bad and dumb idea.

Ned! Mass. too cold for this Bearing! But, if I had to and it being Mass., I would probably cut everything 15%!

...

Re Japan, I am following this as closely as I can because we source 85% or so of our bearings from Korea and Japan. Today's article about India banning Japanese fish imports of some kind had an interesting Reply that showed that the Fukushima radiation would be carried by the winds to southern Japan and then over S. Korea over the next few days Ugh.

I also read somewhere today that it looks like Fukushima will likely turn out to be the world's worst man-made disaster (I presume that excludes wars). Ugh again.

EDIT:

Disclosure, since I know nothing of Massachussetts' state finances, the above 15% is really meant more as humor than a real proposal.

On the other hand, make me governor of California, and yes I would cut, cut, cut, cut and cut.

HELLO??? Where does all the free money given to the states by the Federal government come from?

HELLO? Where does all the state money paid to local and county government come from???

HELLO?? Where does all the money come from to pay the salaries and pensions and healthcare and taxes of ALL Government workers???

HELLO??? Where does all the money come from to pay the bloated prevailing wages of government contractors union workers???

HELLO??? Where does all the money come from that pays the salaries, healthcare, retirement, and taxes of ALL employees that get most of their income as a result of government contracts, grants, and purchases???

ALL GOVERNMENT SPENDING IS PAID BY THE REST OF US THAT HAVE REAL JOBS. HELLO???? Do you get it yet????

Look, everyone agrees that the consumer drives the economy. The consumer spending is efficient spending creating real demand for goods and services that create real jobs and real economic growth and prosperity.

The government spending is downsizing the real consumers' ability to grow real demand spending to effect real economic growth and real GDP growth and prosperity.

ALL Government spending comes ONLY from those of us that have REAL jobs. The Government then redistributes that money as it sees fit with the financial beneficiaries being ONLY those that do not have real jobs. Is it starting to sink in yet???

This redistribution to create consumers is artificial. Created by government. THIS IS DONE BY OUR CAREER POLITICIANS WHO HAVE BEEN CHOOSING THE WINNERS AND LOSERS.

HELLO??? The winners are receiving the government money. The losers are paying all the money that, one way or another, the career politicians pay out to hacks and special interests.

As for the vilification of businesses and banks. They only do and get away with that which the career politicians want/allow/require/let them do. The Career Politicians are responsible. Profits go to the top because they do not have to go to the bottom (workers). The profits do not have to go to the workers because there are too many workers and not enough jobs. Why? 20 million guest workers and illegals. 10 million legal Americans unemployed. Go figure. The career politicians have not really effectively enforced the guest worker and immigration laws. Their personal and special interests want it that way. This is not what is best for the American People and America.

BOTTOM LINE: We are responsible for electing these career politicians. WE are responsible for not paying attention. We are responsible for having trusted the career politicians to do what was actually best for the People and the Nation. WE were asleep. Shame on us. They woke us up. WE WILL NO LONGER BE SILENT.

We are now paying attention. We will now hold them accountable. We gave them the first small taste of our bottom up leadership on Nov. 2, 2010. 2012 will take care of the rest of them that just don't get it.

"Though if I were President, I would pick and choose cuts with gleeful abandon..."

Would it be like the Republicans' who just voted to extend farm subsidies (put in place by FDR's brain trust of Liberal Progressives after they visited the USSR), but now want to slash other social programs?

DCRB, while I enjoy most of your postings, this reply was not one of them. The Politicians in DC use fuzzy math all the time, to make thier point that they can't afford to use real math or it exposes too much. We could cut 10% across the board and it wouldn't be enough to cover the interest on the national debt.

Ryans proposal was DOA and just another shot in the finger pointing over who's fault the shutdown will be. It wasn't realistic to begin with considering Defense was verbotten.

If we cut 10%, froze spending on the rest and managed to increase income by 10% it would still take three years (10% each year) to reach a "balanced budget"...We are not going to see a 30% increase in revenue in this economy and no one on the hill has the courage to propose sensible cuts that would actually do something.

The new healthcare bill alone created a "federal police" along with reporting standards for metal purchases and who knows what else in it's 3,000-plus pages. What that has to do with getting healthcare to people who need it, I don;t know.

Uhhh...you prepared to detroy the productive capacity of the rest of the world to get there? That's how we did it last time in the little tit-for-tat we like to call WWII. At the end nobody else had any industrial capacity. We eliminated the competition.

That would be the PERSONAL income tax, Comrade. Of course GE paid nothing. I pay more than nothing - anything is too much. GE pays no corporate tax because their lawyers wrote the tax code. Immelt owns the US presidential palace.

I tell you about abominations. An ever decreasing tax rate for corporations, and yet they rarely pay any taxes. And their participation in tax's total revenue still is kinda low (considering the rest of the bill is footed by individuals, specially those who can't avoid em - those who have less). You can lower that rate and you'll still get no corps. to pay anything. Even more nowadays with so many people working for free just to be able to put in their CV's that they weren't unemployed. Damn, I'm thinking about starting a business, you know how great returns on cotton were, right? I might start a plantation myself. And I'm only gonna hire Americans who work for free. And considering I'm not in the states, I'm not gonna pay em a plane ticket. Just a place inside a container carrying ship. It's a return to the good old days, you wanna sign up? Polish your CV with exciting experience in the cotton picking industry now!

Thank god there are other people out there who "get it".........government is not an effective "allocator" of capital, "innovation", job creation, "efficiency", "waste reduction", well, much of anything.

Is it any small wonder that Washington DC has seen the fastest home price appreciation & real income growth over the past decade of any STATE in the UNION? (I know DC isn't a state, per se, but that's how the economic table was presented.

Rich liberal doo-gooders.......always blame the adult republicans FOR TRYING TO CLEAR UP THE LIBERALS MESS!

To continually point out the budget under President Blow Job (aka Slick Willy) is a joke......heard of SPURIOUS CORRELATION? WHY NOT GET TO CAUSATION.......the tax rates had very little to do with it as the "surplus" was driven mainly by (1) declining interest rates (2) Slick Willy changing the debt maturity profile (see moving to volatile short term funding) (3) Manipulating the long end of the yield curve (no more long bonds) (4) SPENDING REDUCTIONS (as % of GDP) (5) AGAIN, ADULT REPUBLICANS IN THE HOUSE LOCKING THE BASTARDS OUT!!!!!!!!!

The Ryan plan is far from perfect, but as Barack said many times, its about COMPROMISE.......So any good negotiator would advise not to begin with the plan you want, but give yourself some negotiating points.......AT LEAST THE GOP HAD THE BALLS TO TAKE THE LEAD

I appreciate some of your comments but allow me to stick my two cents in right here. ANY austerity - in an attempt to pay 'our' debts is merely carrying water for the TPTB. They want to get paid back. And squeezing austerity merely will complete the transfer of wealth to the elites/bondholders. Austerity assumes the debt is legitimate. It is not. We should not be borrowing our money from the banks and the Fed. Default is the best option for the people.

Then we can create a people's budget - no wars, no standing armies, no interest, etc.

From the title I was expecting real math instead of this touchy-feely crap. Yeah get rid of loopholes and lower the overall rate...voila more corporate tax receipts. ZH how can you pass on this statist crap? Oh, we paid for our social security, no you paid it under the guise of social security and it was already spent as regular tax receipts...the ponzi continues.

I'm really amazed at this mindset. We clearly have a jobs problem in this country and the solution is to dis-incentivize people who want to start businesses and create jobs by taxing them to death? Then the "middle and lower" classes wonder why they have no jobs?

The solution is to eliminate this woman's former employers (Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns) and reward real, productive businesses for creating jobs. A small business owner should be rebated for each permanent position that is created.

We are doing no such thing. Greater than half of the "200k" was created by the fantasy birth-death computer model. The "improvement" in the labor market is not evident in the labor participation rate (now at two decade lows?) or the hourly wage component.

The only reason the unemployment rate is less than 10% is because they don't count people who stop looking for work!

If you truly cared about the "middle and lower" classes you would demand an accurate representation of the labor statistics in this country. The fact that you have a limited understanding of this reeks of an agenda.

More bogus nonsense. The money to pay government salaries comes from the private sector. Every job that exists in the government is one that can't exist in the private sector.

The "lower and middle" classes are struggling so much partly because of the outrageous tax burden they are under. Property taxes in NJ, for example, can easily hit 10k a year for a dumpy house. Where does that money go? Why, it goes to pay the benefits of someone like Joseph DiVencenzo Jr.

the answer is to become your own government. that means "don't pay your taxes at all, raise a private army with Buffet's front running dough and invade Iowa for no apparent reason." trust me, everything 'll be just fine then.

it is a "dimension." at first i thought: Kafka. Then, no Dali. But now I realize "it's the Comedy Channel in Hell." I can't stop laughing at it--it's killing me. Literally! WTF's funny about...ah, forget that thought.

+100 corn hole the silly statist hindsight, 200K jobs a month, what a fool to believe that. prof. hindsight probably thinks that the debt/gdp is less than 100% too (uh add in Fannie, Freddy and unfunded liabilities). You would think that someone on ZH would not buy this crap.

Rah rah rah go Obummer. The fact is labor will not improve as long as there are so many over paid pencil pushing porno watching bureaucrats sucking the life blood out of this nation. Get rid of the majorty of those boils on the hind end of society and we will be better off.

instead of getting rid of them-- how about requiring them to do their fucking jobs and enforce the laws on the books against outright fraud. The higher ups at the SEC, Congress and other govt agencies have been sucking Wall St. dick (and likely some Koch as well) for at least the past dozen years. They have been corrupted/bribed into incompetence , inaction and or malfeasance by venal vulture corps and banksters to betray their oaths and their country. As someone so well said above, exhortations to austerity are bs distractions/misdirections from the massive ongoing criminal manipulations and theft that are responsible for the financial crisis and most of the deficits we face.

"In the second sentence I ment to say that by decreasing government revenue, we will lose government jobs which will be counter productive and delay the recovery."

So. using this logic, we heavily tax private businesses and employees, thus ensuring we end up with less of both, so that we can create more government jobs. Brilliant. You may well be the next Nobel Prize winner in Economics!

"The solution is to eliminate this woman's former employers... and reward real, productive businesses"

You don't have the capacity to judge whether or not her former employers or other businesses are real, productive businesses. Only the actions of a multitude of market participants can determine that. It is revealed through the financial losses or gains of the entity in question. Too many losses, and the owners (the shareholders) will be put in a position where they are no longer able to hurt any one with their bad decisions.

I guess a reduction in the thefts commited against them is a kind of reward. But, again, you lack the capacity to judge whether hiring employees is good or bad for the economy. With you in charge, there would be without a doubt economic distortions effected solely to take advantage of your proposed "reward". For example, hiring a greater number of less skilled employees, where hiring a small number of skilled employees might in fact be a more productive use of scarce economic resources.

"You don't have the capacity to judge whether or not her former employers or other businesses are real, productive businesses. Only the actions of a multitude of market participants can determine that. It is revealed through the financial losses or gains of the entity in question. Too many losses, and the owners (the shareholders) will be put in a position where they are no longer able to hurt any one with their bad decisions."

Please explain, using this argument, how Bank of America, Citibank, General Motors, GE Capital et al remain in business?

Why would anyone think we need small business to create job's? Let's just keep going down the road of letting uncle sam do all the hiring to prop up this ballon.

Small business is in a short squeeze on health ins, fuel, good and services, product's and commodities to the point of not being able to take care of there great employee's anyway.

Shit, no reason to help that poor mfer who is working 100 hrs a week to meet payroll for the whole team they call friend's. 100 here and a 100 employee's there won't be missed.

Keep that shit up and you want to see pissed? Just wait till the so called dumb fuck small business person, rancher's, farmers etc get a gut full of this bubble bullshit, bank bailing, eating shit off the ground to feed your family finally hit's the fan.

That's when the so called bankster/politician that have been saying, oh it's just raining boy's, while the mfer's are pissing down our neck's, will get a very explicit understanding of the rules, "measure's of last resort."

They don't need it. 5% of the GOP party took bailouts worth Trillions, bonused themselves millions and are living high on the hog while you work an extra 5-10 hours a week just to maintain status quo and support them.

The top 400 oligarchs (I'm sure all 400 are GOP members) in this nation are worth the same as the bottom 150 MILLION peasants. Now ask yourself, has the quality of your life improved the last 10 years? I know mine hasn't. Then why are these guys in charge?

As notedbelow, there are manifest problems with the tax code both on the personal and corporate side. However, the bottom line is corporations don't pay taxes - they collect them for the govt. Ask anyone familiar with a 'rate of return' calculation if they include the tax rate as an input. It would be unthinkable to omit it. Taxes are a cost of doing and they add to the prices all of us pay for goods and services.

I am not advocating passing on more largesse to corporations that already pay the lowest tax % of GDP in the last 50 years but think about this: is the rest of the world dumber than we are because their average corporate tax rate is 25% and ours is 35%?

Especially think about this in the context of the 'off shoring' and 'globalization' debates. The highest cost player in ANY market must make changes or perish.

Ditto. Competitive corporate tax rates mean less offshoring. It really is that simple.

And double ditto, corporations pass their cost of paying taxes on to their customers, the ultimate customer being the consumer.

Beyond that, income taxes of every type are a means of social engineering for the Dead Hand, i.e. Congress, via endless arcane incentives and disincentives. They should leave well enough alone, i.e. END income taxes because reporting them and enforcing them is an affront to liberty. Some type of consumption tax with an exemption for the first X thousand dollars per person per year of spending...let's say something above the poverty level, would bring us back to liberty.

Yeah, and the dumb-o-crats, if they had their way would make everything better, right? Last I checked, they had a couple of years' worth of free reign with Senate, House and Presidency. How'd that work out for you?

Paul Ryan is already captured. He is the intended front runner for supposed fiscal/Tea Party manifestation in coming years. We can stop this in it's tracks by recognizing this early. What is his opinion on Libya/ The Fed?

Why are we even debating cuts without looking to reclaiming the stolen Wall Street wealth through unnecessary POMO premiums?

These gaping wounds...who do they think cannot see them? This GE example could not be more succinct. The crony capitalist are out in the open for all to see. The Fed document dump of last week...was simply breathtaking.

The last rally...that is what we are seeing. All Ponzi schemes end...when the last of the greater fools is found and marked; The Bernank.

"Why are we even debating cuts without looking to reclaiming the stolen Wall Street wealth through unnecessary POMO premiums?" Unfortunately and simply, it's because most Americans are ignorant about POMO and Wall Street, let alone their own finances. Hence, Ryan trying to garner support for this is like trying to attract cats while you're walking with a pitbull.

someday people will wake up and realize that the republicans and democrats ultimately serve the banks and large corporations. This budget battle is all for show, and the powers behind the scenes have probably already decided how this act of the play ends. My bet is on chaos and a looming market crash. the construction of a fascist state is nearly complete, one more step in the plan.

Absolutely correct John39. I guess I need to post this again. I wrote it last year in the middle of the election season when I predicted nothing but gridlock would happen after the election:

"Current politics is best represented by a two headed dragon. Politicians pay lip service to opposing ideologies but both the Republican and Democratic parties are part of the same big government dragon body. The body is moving in one direction; bigger and more powerful government. More control over the electorate. Having the two parties serves a greater purpose though....it divides the populace (sheeple?) into two camps that are always at each others throat. I think this tactic is called divide and conquer. Until we wake up and get away from the 'Repubs this....' or 'Dems that....' blame game then we will be slowly boiled...just like a frog...all while the dragon stands by watching and laughing. "

So cutting the corporate rate to 20% "led to an over-bloated and over-leveraged financial economy during the 1920s followed by the Great Depression". OH, SO THAT'S WHAT IT WAS! THANK YOU SO MUCH LIBERAL HACK NOMI PRINS! http://www.nomiprins.com/

"It didn't make charities out of companies".

Because we all know the point of being in business is to hand out money and save souls!

Now, quoting from the plan:

"The problem with the corporate income tax is that corporations are not taxpayers – they are tax collectors. Taxes on corporate income are borne by shareholders, employees and customers. Investors pay the cost in diminished returns. Workers pay the cost in lower wages. And consumers pay the cost in higher prices."

Is it any surprise whatever proposal coming from the retards on the right and lame ass' from the left ain't going to 'add' up nor provide real solutions to the grand question of what should government be able to provide for the peasants-- I mean people.

And that other 41.5% percent is The GAO ponzi scheme. Individual taxes? (oBANaNA HAS THE AUDACITY), To come on National television and extend daily invites to the House and Senate. He is not even worthy of being a (Caricature of The Golden Arches!)

Umm, they allocate those resources to offshoring jobs. These corporations do not invest in America anymore. You are truly drinking the kool-aid if you think so. Just look at Immelt getting thrown on Obama's job creation team when that dude offshored half of GE. Tyler even made a post about it awhile back. Apparently you haven't been reading this site. You think that those profits go into the average American's pockets? You have to remember that only a very small percentage of this nation has any significant investment in stocks, most people are on fixed income or living paycheck to paycheck. They do not have enough to put into savings either because they are mindless consumers or because they have been disenfranchised. As far as the mindless consumers go, our government has nurtured that type of behavior at the very top of the food chain with cheap credit, inflated bubbles, and other such crumbs for the masses.

Corporations do not pay taxes as it is dumbass. The corporate tax rate means jackshit. The corporations already know how to skirt any official tax rate. I'd just like to point out that when there was a much higher corporate tax rate, there was a much stronger middle class.

And when I mean when there used to be a much higher tax rate, I am referring to a tax rate that the corporations actually paid. Now they use lobbyists to carve out bills that allow for tons of loopholes and even when they get a god damn rebate from the government (I'm looking at you GE) they still whine like a bunch of welfare queens that the tax rate is too high.

You are just like the little peasant boy who used to work in the fields telling all the other peasants, "We need our baron, he protects and invests in our thatches with fresh hey. He tells us what good little boys we are. We mustn't question his motives, he invests in our pitchforks so we can work his land."

This is the world we live in and a world Americans better learn to accept. This is, for better or worse, a world of Global Capitalism. Countries around the world compete for jobs and capital. America is clearly losing this game. America is not a cost competitive place to do business.

Other countries are more friendly to business and capital. China in particular. Does China gain this competitive advantage by treating workers like shit and poisoning the air? Sure they do. But it doesn't change the end result.

America better wake the fuck up and encourage people to start businesses and create jobs.

Accept it? Maybe you will pussy. All of you are bootlickers for your masters. You want to be more like China? Those fuckers live in a god damn totalitarian hellhole. You think we're going to let that happen here? No fucking way. Capital will not own us in the end, we will triumph over the croney-capital and restore a more just system.

Look at this guy Corn with an American flag in his title. He wants to be more like China? HAH. Race to the bottom with these dipshits. Go move to China and work in a factory for a bowl of rice you fucking lapdog. You don't deserve to breathe.

You want to be more like China? Those fuckers live in a god damn totalitarian hellhole. You think we're going to let that happen here? No fucking way. Capital will not own us in the end, we will triumph over the croney-capital and restore a more just system.

It could have been a story of China becoming more like the US. Probably past the pole though...

I dont dig in that story of the US becoming like China. A new wave of colonization is going to happen because the US hosts a big bubble known as the middle class that no longer has its place on the US soil. Poor and rich, been a tango for millenia now. But the middle class, you'll see them move out of the US as they can no longer afford living in the US.

Put our labor market on equal footing with a mercantilist region of the world that runs a feudal-slave operation while the vast majority of it's population live in absolute filth and squalor, and we'll talk.

I think that's part of the point... What's the point of a 35% tax rate when small business (companies that can't afford a team of accountants and the 'double irish') are the only ones that pay it?

I own a small business, we pay tax out the wazoo. We can't dodge it, skirt it, any of that. Meanwhile we shit ourselves that the IRS will find something we screwed up and fine us even more (unlike the likes of Timmy Geithner).

If the corporate tax rate was 25% AND vastly simplified, if it was enforceable it would actually be a tax increase for a lot of the mega multi nationals.

Thanks for posting this. I surely wouldn't have seen it otherwise. I presume that you post it not becuase you agree with the content per se, but as the presentation of another perspective.

That said, the only observation of hers with which I agree is that 0% or 50% doesn't matter to GE. It becomes a function of the number of CPA's required to evade tax liability to the greatest extent possible.

What is not discussed by Ms. Prins, however, is the notion that corporations don't pay taxes, they merely collect them. To the extent a corporation pays taxes, it takes that money from its customers, employees, or shareholders. If you want the shareholders (i.e., you, in your 401(k)) to shoulder more of the burden, raise the dividend tax. If you want customers to shoulder the burden, levy a FairTax or sales tax. If you want the employees to shoulder it, raise the payroll tax.

A corporate tax in and of itself incentivizes tax evasion at the corporate level, and between Honest Co. and Cheatco., Honest Co. goes out of business because it wasn't willing to aggressively offshore jobs and revenue and therefore, it's relative profits (and therefore share price) are lower. It cannot compete as effectively as Cheatco.

The average person doesn't understand this, and I get why they want WalMart, GE, and DuPont to "pay their fair share" but they don't understand the impact to them personally, in the form of offshored jobs and decreased economic activity. I wish people could get it. But if Nomi Prins doesn't get it, and the Republicans in the Tea Party contingent aren't talking about it, I think we're pretty much screwed.

Look at all the junks. I've never seen so many. Virtually every post has 'junks'. That's good .. it means people are 'engaged' ( or perhaps it means the air force has gotten it's virtual posters up and running)

Limiting, or even eliminating corporate tax would be acceptable if corporations would stay the fuck out of government. Stop bribing Congress,Presidents,Judges and Regulators and ...fine, have a zero tax rate (just don't pollute the environment).

Corporations employ people and that's good. Sure they attempt to offshore jobs and a host of other unsavory things.... it would never happen if they were not bribing Government. They do that because it's so 'cost effective'. A dollar spent in campaign contributions or however it's euphemised has proven to be an effective method to gain corporate objectives. That is the underlying reason the U.S. has become a fascist nation. Money has literally bought the government.

Our tax code is a joke. It's thicker than the Bible and the reason for that is all the lobbying done (read bribing done) to exclude certain parties from paying a fair share.

Let's get rid of every damn deduction... the reasoning being that we are hopelessly susceptible to letting the highest bidder influence the tax code (ESPECIALLY DEDUCTIONS).

I think you're overlooking, or ignoring, that coupled with reducing the corporate tax rates the loopholes we all know allow corporations to pay inordinately low rates will be simultaneously closed. Unless, of course, there is a double-cross like the Democrats did to Reagan in 1986.

Don't you realize that if all of the wealth of the top 1% of Americans were seized tomorrow, that it would retire less than 1/3 of the national debt? And, having done that, what would happen to the jobs that some among those wealthy provided via their business enterprises?

The government needs to have a low-rate tax-holiday on offshore earnings, to entice corporations to repatriate those funds. And, if the corporate rate is low enough businesses will base here instead of other places; especially ones that manufacture for US consumption.

Ryan's plan is not perfect, but it's a reasonable start; moreso than any being put forth by anyone else.

"Sure, the budget stands a bloated mess. But the revenue side and mechanism is far more broken than the spending side, "

One side is just as broke as the other. Why is the fact never addressed that corporations never pay taxes regardless if the tax rates are 35% or 50%. They just pass the cost on to consumers. Even if they closed all the loop holes prices would just be raised to compensate. The only real answer is a flat tax. No loopholes for any entity.

Those who believe that Ryan is serious about cutting spending should read the Constitution. All spending bills originate in the House. Neither the Senate nor the President have any authority to spend. Ryan's party controls the House. Therefore, Ryan and his fellow Republicans can stop spending anytime they want. Like now. Or tomorrow.

Instead, we get these phoney "budgets" about cutting spending by "x" over ten years. I'll gladly consider next years cuts Ryan, just as soon as you show me where you are going to cut TODAY. So far, all I've seen is Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood. What a fricken' joke.

Jimmy Carter steered this ship of state into an ice berg and we've been doing nothing but rearranging the deck chairs. It's going down by the bow and nothing is going to stop it from sinking. You should have your life boat made of Gold, Silver, Food, and Ammunition.

Sorry. Game was lost under Nixon: took the dollar off gold, devalued the buck causing inflation to rocket over 6% so imposed 3 years of wage and price freezes/controls (which ended in 1974 with 12% inflation in Q3), expanded Vietnam before ending it in disgrace leaving the country in deep debt (the beginnings of our national debt crisis and key cause of "The Nixon Shock"), presided over the first oil shock, a mini-banking crisis and several large corporate bankruptcies, used taxpayer money to improve homes in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, sold government favors to big businesses causing huge scandals (took bribes): Lockheed, ITT, Penn Central, Annaconda Copper, Armo Steel, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust, was involved in other scandals including the wheat scandal, the dairy fund scandal, the carpet manufacturers scandal, the postal bond scandal, several anti-trust scandals, including Warner/Lambert, National Steel/ Granite City Steel, and LIng/Tempco/Vought, just to name a few (many bribed him to evade his own price controls) VP forced to resign due to criminal charges, 40 cabinet members and officials jailed or convicted during Watergate, had first dibs on "I'm not a crook", caught on tape offering to buy silence from Watergate burglars, tampered with CIA, FBI and IRS to crush political enemies.....Capped it off by resigning under fire after a million lies and stalls....That changed the course of the US economically and politically forever.

Excellent post. "Tricky Dick" was a crook. Worse ...he took the country (and the world) off the gold standard. That more or less set the stage for this mountain of debt we now find ourselves buried under.

Effective January 1, 2011 the corporate income tax rate falls to 16.5% from 18% of 2010 corporate income tax rate. Yearly tax reductions will see the corporate income tax rate fall to 15% as of January 1, 2012. These corporate income tax reductions, says the Department of Finance Canada, will give Canadian corporations the lowest tax rate on new business investment in the Group of Seven (G7) by 2011 and the lowest statutory tax rate in the G7 by 2012.

I can't seem to make the italics toggle off, so will just mention that the unemployment rate in Canadia is officially 7.8 %. Is there a correlation here? Beats me, but the U.S. looks pretty screwed up from here.

Why is it we see the problems, and the Fat Cats in D.C. don't? (Constituents!) 70B is a pittance, of what needs to be cut. We should be taking 1/2 trillion bites out at a time. We should quit debasing the dollar. We should start rebuilding and retooling our economy. We should get rid of deadbeats, and murderers that cross our borders with impunity. We should elect people that are qualified to develope a strong international strateqy.